Abstract
Throughout the 1966–1983 period of the Hollywood musical, the genre experienced a major shift in tone—musical and otherwise. Appearing to respond to major changes in the industry, filmmaking style, motion picture regulation, and the tumultuous American culture, a musical more reflective of social and cultural mores began to overtake the more idealistic version that had been popular through the previous decades. Despite a sprinkling of Hello, Dolly!s and Annies (1982), stories, visuals, and sounds deviated from previous norms, projecting an ambivalence toward entrenched generic dictates and the ideals they projected. These films popularized a new set of musical tropes that would—through repetition—begin to solidify a new dominant version of the genre more reflective of contemporary mores. Although not as monetarily successful as in the earlier days of the musical, the genre revision did more aptly reflect the kind of social contract film genres supposedly represent between those in the industry and the viewers who (hopefully) fill theatres.
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Notes
For Altman this definition led to an exclusion of films from his study that did not engage with romance at their core (such as Shirley Temple films, The Wizard of Oz, Oliver!). Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: Random House, 1981) 28–9;
Rick Altman, American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 28–32.
Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men (New York: Doubleday, 1983) 42–51, 68–87.
Marvin B. Sussman, Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Gary W. Peterson, The Handbook of Marriage and Family, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer, 1999) 55.
Marc Miller, “Of Tunes and Toons: The Movie Musical in the 1990s,” Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) 45–6.
Toril Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” New Literary History 22:4 (Autumn 1991) 1026–7.
This shift to male focus in the musical reflects not only high-profile movements afoot at the time—anti- and pro-war groups, feminism, gay rights— but also others simmering just below the surface. Early incarnations of the American Men’s Movement emerged from the Black Panther Movement and Women’s Movement of the sixties and seventies. By the mid-1970s the group that would become the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) had begun staging Men and Masculinity Conferences. The groups that would grow out of the early movement partook in various forms of personal introspection and gender-role examination. For more on the American Men’s Movement see Judith Newton, From Panthers to Promise Keepers: Rethinking the Men’s Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)
and Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America (New York: The Free Press, 1996).
In her discussion of screenplay form, Linda Seger defines the role of the confidant as one serving largely as a sounding board for the internal struggles of the protagonist. In the case of 1776, John is able to show vulnerability with Abigail, an opportunity not given by the other male members of the Continental Congress. Linda Seger, Making a Good Script Great (Hollywood and New York: Samuel French, 1994) 201–3.
Scholars such as Richard Dyer, Sean Griffin, and Arthur Knight have examined the lack or generic/ideological problematic nature of racial integration in the Hollywood musical. Dyer highlights the overall dearth of non-whites in musicals taking place in worlds such as the Caribbean (The Pirate), the South Pacific (South Pacific), and the American West (Oklahoma!) and puts it succinctly when he states, “Even when such stars as Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers, Bill Robinson, Hazel Scott, Ethel Waters and Lena Horne were used, it was nearly always in one kind of ghetto or another: the all-black musical…, the number that can be dropped without doing violence to the story or editing (such as Horne’s intense ‘Where or When’ in Words and Music …) , or, in the case of the sublime Bill Robinson, kiddies’ corner, squiring Shirley Temple.” Griffin’s “The Gang’s All Here: Generic Versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical” discusses the early integrated musicals’ overall lack of racial integration. Reflecting on Dyer’s argument from “Entertainment as Utopia” that the musical reinforces a utopian sense of abundance, energy, and community, Griffin hypothesizes about the generic and narrative complications that the inclusion of African Americans on Meet Me in St Louis’s trolley or Native Americans in Oklahoma!’s hoedown would have presented. Both Arthur Knight’s Disintegrating the Musical and Griffin highlight the complications related to cultivating African American musical leading ladies (such as Lena Horne), African American inclusion in the Black cast musicals such as MGM’s Cabin in the Sky, and the reliance on specialty performance numbers to showcase African American talent (for example, the Nicholas Brothers at Fox). Knight further examines the overall landscape of African Americans in the heyday of the film musical, from the aforementioned categories, to the prominent role of blackface for both whites and African Americans and the conflicted space of African American resistance once possible with a live audience and improbable in the controlled and unidirectional space of the motion picture house. Richard Dyer, “The Colour of Entertainment” Sight and Sound 5:11 (November 1995) 29, 31.
Sean Griffin, “The Gang’s All Here: Generic Versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical,” Cinema Journal 42:1 (2002) 21–7.
Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002).
Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical,” Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 32;
Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 35–8; Altman, American Film Musical, 200–9.
Mary Desjardins, “Systematizing Scandal: Confidential Magazine, Stardom, and the State of California,” Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal, eds Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001) 210.
For more on Pachuco culture see Catherine Sue Ramirez, “Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics,” Meridians 2:2 (2002) 1–35.
For more on the Zoot Suit Riots and Henry Leyvas see Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2003).
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© 2010 Kelly Kessler
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Kessler, K. (2010). Nothing Is Comin’ Up Roses: The Desertion of Narrative Utopia. In: Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290556_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290556_2
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